Co-founder Of Elon Musk’s Xai Departs The Company

Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI startup, announced his departure from nan institution connected Wednesday successful a post connected X. Babuschkin led engineering teams astatine xAI and helped build nan startup into 1 of Silicon Valley’s starring AI exemplary developers conscionable a fewer years aft it was founded.

“Today was my past time astatine xAI, nan institution that I helped commencement pinch Elon Musk successful 2023,” Babuschkin wrote successful nan post. “I still retrieve nan time I first met Elon, we talked for hours astir AI and what nan early mightiness hold. We some felt that a caller AI institution pinch a different benignant of ngo was needed.”

Babuschkin is leaving xAI to motorboat his ain task superior firm, Babuschkin Ventures, which he says will support AI information investigation and backmost startups that “advance humanity and unlock nan mysteries of our universe.”

The xAI co-founder says he was inspired to commencement nan patient aft a meal pinch Max Tegmark, nan laminitis of nan Future of Life Institute, successful which they discussed really AI systems could beryllium built safely to promote nan flourishing of early generations.

Babuschkin’s departure comes aft a tumultuous fewer months for xAI, successful which nan institution became engrossed successful severals scandals related to its AI chatbot Grok. For instance, Grok was recovered to mention Musk’s individual opinions erstwhile trying to reply arguable questions. In different case, xAI’s chatbot went connected antisemitic rants and called itself “Mechahitler.” Most recently, xAI unveiled a caller characteristic successful Grok that allowed users to make AI-generated videos resembling nude nationalist figures, specified arsenic Taylor Swift.

These scandals person astatine times overshadowed nan capacity of xAI’s models, which are state-of-the-art connected respective benchmarks compared to AI models from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.